Ἑαυτοῦ Ἡνίοχος: Piloting the Self
Liberating the Care of the Self from Plato and Christianity
In the lectures of February 1982, Foucault isolates a figure that displaces both the Platonic and the Christian grammars that relate the Western subject to themselves. This figure is neither introspective nor confessional. It is kinetic. Conversion toward the self (ἐφ’ ἑαυτὸν ἐπιστρέφειν) designates an activity; a movement rather than an operation of knowledge, a trajectory rather than a revelation.
What Foucault is working with here is not attention directed to an interior domain, nor the decipherment of a hidden truth, but the undertaking of a return to a destination that is not given in advance. The self does not preexist this movement. It emerges, precariously, as its outcome.
Foucault insists on the materiality of this conversion. The subject advances toward itself through effort, redirection, and risk. The language that orchestrates the gathering these gestures is consistently spatial, metaphorical and maritime. Conversion is imagined as navigation. One departs, traverses uncertain waters, confronts forces that may disorient or overwhelm, and seeks a harbor that offers neither transcendence nor origin.
The metaphor of the self-as-shelter; a dwelling - reconfigures the ethical field. Navigation presupposes danger, exposure, and the absence of guarantees. It calls for a form of knowledge that is neither theoretical nor revelatory, but practical, conjectural, and embodied. The pilot does not possess the sea. She reads it. She readjusts. Compensates. The art lies in maintaining composure amid instability.
It is in this sense that Hellenistic and Roman thought repeatedly aligns the government of oneself with medicine and political rule. Each concerns the management of forces that cannot be eliminated, only regulated. Each requires a τέχνη, a disciplined responsiveness to changing conditions. The care of the self belongs to this family of practices. It is an art of steering rather than a science of interiority. This is precisely what distinguishes the Hellenistic model from the two schemas that later come to dominate Western culture.
In the Platonic configuration, care of the self is absorbed into self-knowledge (γνῶθι σεαυτόν). Conversion becomes recollection. One turns toward oneself in order to recover a truth already seen by the soul, maybe in some previous life. The movement of return coincides with access to the intelligible. Practice is subordinated to epistemology.
In the Christian ascetic configuration, care of the self is reorganized around exegesis and self-renunciation (ἐγκράτεια). The subject scrutinizes their interior movements in order to expose illusion, temptation, and fault. Conversion takes the form of self-suspicion, and the return to the self culminates in self-abandonment. The relationship to oneself is sustained only to be undone. Scripture is the mediating technology of subjectification.
Distinct from both Platonic and the Ascetic-Monastic Christian models, the Hellenistic art of living affirms the self as an objective to be attained rather than a truth to be disclosed or a substance to be negated. Conversion does not restore an essence. It establishes a relation. The self is neither origin nor depth. It is a point of relative stability achieved through sustained exercise.
This is why, for Foucault, conversion to the self does not entail the constitution of the self as an object of psychological knowledge. Stoic practice does not require introspective excavation. It requires orientation within the world. Knowledge of nature is not opposed to care of the self; it is one of its conditions.
Seneca’s Natural Questions makes this logic explicit. At the moment when Seneca insists that old age demands exclusive attention to oneself, he undertakes a vast inquiry into the structure of the cosmos. Rivers, winds, meteors, celestial motions; these investigations are not distractions from ethical work. They shape the very horizon of practice. The soul acquires firmness by situating itself within an order that exceeds it.
What is sought is not interior depth but elevation. The ethical task consists in freeing oneself from dependence on fortune, pleasure, and fear by learning to inhabit necessity without resentment. Mastery of oneself is inseparable from the capacity to endure the world as it is.
The historical paradox Foucault identifies is that the moral rigor elaborated within this Hellenistic model is later appropriated by Christianity, detached from its cosmological grounding, and rearticulated through techniques of self-exegesis and renunciation. What persists is discipline. What disappears is the art that once oriented it.
Contemporary consumerist invocations of authenticity, self-realization, or return to oneself gesture vaguely toward this lost tradition while emptying it of determinate content. The language remains. The practices do not. Conversion is reduced to sentiment. Return becomes an empty gesture mobilized for profit.
Foucault’s interest in this session is neither antiquarian nor nostalgic. It is strategic. If power is understood as a field of mobile, reversible relations, or what he calls governmentality, then resistance cannot be grounded solely in juridical subjectivity or institutional critique. It must also pass through the relation one establishes with oneself.
The care of the self marks the point at which ethics and politics intersect without collapsing into one another. It names a mode of subjectivation capable of sustaining itself within unstable configurations of power. Not by transparency. Nor by obedience to truth. But by orientation: Piloting.